Writer: Lee Loughridge
Artist: Andrew Robinson
Colorist: Lee Loughridge
Designer & Letterer: Rob Tweedie
Cover Artists: Andrew Robinson, Cary Nord & Matteo Scalera
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $4.99
Release Date: August 21, 2024
A man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt orders cocktails in a biker bar. He insults the club members' attire. They drag him off his barstool and slam him into the wall. Will he become the Murder City Devils' latest victim? Or can he turn the tables on the angry bikers? Let's leap onto our Harleys, ride into Standstill #1, and find out!
Story
We don't learn the man's name. But the grin on his face bespeaks his confidence. He takes his time, upping the ante, with one comment after another steadily increasing their ire. The bartender announces the man finally lit the fuse when the bikers drag him into the corner. He presses a shotgun into the man's face. Suddenly, the man isn't in their hands. He leans against the bar again. He admires a long knife. He wonders if it is what the bikers used to kill a woman.
Colin Shaw's wife is leaving him. Lara is tired of living in this small town. She hopes leaving will prompt Colin to stop obsessing about past failures and spinning conspiracy theories. But instead of channeling his energies into a new project, Colin returns to the basement after she roars off in her red convertible. He works late into the night, studying news from around the globe. Someone has gotten past elaborate security to attack corporations, rob banks, behead drug lords, and disgrace or kill monarchs. Colin didn't perform these acts. Yet he believes his invention enabled them to carry out these seemingly impossible tasks.
In Standstill #1, Lee Loughridge begins an epic tale about a device that can stop time and a man who uses it to right wrongs. The government realizes someone stole the device, and they have no way to track it. Colin Shaw is their only hope. Can he build another and help them prevent the thief from destabilizing the international community?
Art
The nameless man swaggers through the bar in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. He smokes a cigarette using a long holder. The men around him wear leather, denim, and scarves over their heads. Tattoos adorn their skin. He smiles while they frown. Even when they drag him away, he never loses his grin. Corky, the burly bartender, gathers with the others before the bar when the man does his strange disappearing and reappearing act. Then his eyes bulge, and his jaw drops as he clutches a bloody knife with tattooed fingers spelling a four-letter word.
The nameless man's green and yellow shirt shines bright amid the subdued tones of the darkened bar. The green is reflected in the backlit bottles along the wall, while the cigarette flame and the downlight over the pool table echo the yellow in the man's shirt. Lee Loughridge contrasts these bright colors with orange and purple, while color washes and black dots increase the atmosphere in this den of iniquity.
Andrew Robinson utilizes horizontal layouts across two pages in Standstill #1. Panels often stretch across the pages, and arrangement ignores staple boundaries. The big screen treatment unfolds quickly, from the sun-dappled greenery outside Colin Shaw's traditional American house to a late-night diner painted in subdued yellows, browns, and greens, Colin's basement office illuminated by two widescreen monitors, and a red and white plane flying over puffy white clouds in the bright blue sky. The nameless man rides in First Class. Yet now his attire is subdued, and the man beside him usurps his King Of Cool image. But the blue glow of the nameless man's wrist bracelet reminds us who is in charge.
Rob Tweedie slips uppercase black letters into white dialogue balloons. The letters grow bold for intonation and swell for raised voices. Sound effects elevate the taut opening scene, as the bikers slam the man into a wall and pound their fists into bricks when he vanishes. Thanks to Image Comics for providing a copy for review.
Final Thoughts
If you could put the world on pause, you could go anywhere and perform any action without anyone being the wiser. As the inventor of such a device tracks the man who stole it, Standstill #1 ponders how quickly this godlike ability would corrupt whoever uses it.
Rating 9.6/10
For more covers see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.
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